Uglow is a matchless popular historian of the British nineteenth century her 2002 book, “ The Lunar Men,” is among the best social histories of British life to have appeared in the past twenty or so years. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). No one would seem better qualified to write a biography of Lear than Jenny Uglow, and now she has, with “ Mr. Lear has a certain amount of nursery nationalism about him if you read him when you’re a small child, as more Brits seem to than Americans, he becomes, as W. H.

But his work seems so self-enclosed and self-evident that championing him has felt unnecessary, even impudent. And no history of the limerick, or of light verse, can escape his imposing presence. His classic love ballad, “The Owl and the Pussycat,” was voted the most popular British childhood poem in 2014, and has been set to music by everyone from Stravinsky to Laurie Anderson. About Lear less has been written, perhaps because there does not seem as much to say. Of the two great makers of nonsense, Carroll rightly has received more attention, because of his twists and quirks, because of his photography and the ghost of pedophilia falsely supposed to cling to his obsessions.

Like the porn, it was amazingly generative, so that most works of Dada and Surrealism bear the marks of mid-Victorian Englishness, descending from Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, as much as modern erotica takes on those nineteenth-century disguises. All that sense, decorum, and propriety produced the first fully achieved literature of nonsense. The Victorians, famously puritanical, are also famous for providing the template of modern pornography-the words “Victorian classic” on a paperback have long meant a dirty book-while on the other side of that earnest, progressive Victorian rationality are the mad leaps of Victorian irrationality. Cultures, like caterpillars, crawl forward in contradictions, drawing back and then suddenly springing forward.

Complete nonsense poems by edward lear